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hen Jesus returned to Nazareth early on in his teaching, familiarity caused the people in his hometown to treat him much less warmly than the crowds elsewhere, where his past was an unknown commodity.

“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” and they took offense at Him. (Mark 6:3, NAS)

As a result, there were no big miracles recorded in Nazareth at a time when Jesus was using miracles to establish his identity as the Son of God.  In the previous chapter, a bleeding woman was healed simply by having faith and touching the hem of His robe as He walked to the home of a synagogue official, where He raised the official’s daughter from the dead.  Yet in Nazareth:

And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. (Mark 6:5)

Could? In my years as a Christian, I’ve read this verse at least three or four times and I’ve probably heard it preached even more often, but I never noticed it said “could,” not “would” or simply, “He performed no miracles there.” I checked a half dozen other translations this morning (thanks to a very handy YouVersion Holy Bible app on my iPhone) and all said “could” or “was not able.” The Message it was “because He couldn’t get over their stubborness.”

It wasn’t a matter of choice, then, it was a matter of power.  Imagine that, the Son of God, the Trinity, powerful enough to create life or call down legions of angels, stopped in His tracks by a simple lack of faith, a bit of too much smarty-pants, know-it-all knowledge. C.S. Lewis wrote:

The disease that will certainly end our species … if it is not crushed, (is) the fatal superstition that men can create values; that a community can choose its “ideology” as men choose their clothes.

The people of Nazareth chose their ideology, going with the familiar and comforting – Jesus is just that carpenter’s kid – instead of forcing themselves to alter their reality and acknowledge something beyond their power of simple comprehension.  As a result, lives there were not transformed.

All around our world, people are doing the same.  They worship knowledge and become too familiar with explanations for everything that leave out Everything: God.  Even Christians can become too familiar with Jesus and lose His power in their hearts, remembering that they once gave themselves to Him, but not realizing that His role has slipped and self-created values have gained prominence.

Could Jesus work a miracle in your life, even if He wanted to?  I’m not sure I can  answer “Yes!” in all truthfulness.  Can you?

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he White House has issued a clarification on its stated policy regarding operations in Somalia related to the activities of pirates, and apologized for the recent incident in which three pirates were killed.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs confirmed that the Navy had misunderstood President Obama’s orders, resulting in the unfortunate death of three working class, teenage pirates and a probable deterioration in how pacifists and life-long America-haters may feel about America.

Gibbs stated that a careful review of audiotapes of a conversation between the president and the Secretary of Navy proved the president did not say, “I authorize ATTACKS on the pirates,” but rather, “I authorize A TAX on the pirates.”

Gibbs said that as a result of the missunderstanding, the president has issued a formal apology, which will be delivered to Somalia as soon as someone finds a Somali government official to deliver it to.  Gibbs also confirmed that the president has signed a new excutive order, ruling that 95 percent of Somalis will now receive a tax cut.

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This morning, the Pentagon announced that it will soon release new photos of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in action since Eric Holder’s Justice Dept. decided it will not continue the Bush DOJ’s efforts to  keep the photos away from the prying eyes of terrorists and anti-Americans, like the ACLU, which is suing for their release.

It’s not surprising the photos are out. What defense could the admin mount to keep them secret if they’ve already released the memos on the same interrogation techniques? Actions have consequences.

This latest development in the unfolding trashing of defense and security by Obama reveals the depth of his hard-left, anti-American feelings … and the people get it. They might forgive him selling the economy down the river, but they don’t like him making them less secure so he can keep MoveOn.org and the ACLU happy. Rasmussen:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos about the harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects endangers the national security of the United States. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 28% believe the release of the memos helps America’s image abroad. …

Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

To those who think the release help our image abroad, should you go to your grave as the result of terrorism spawned by the release of these documents, I hope you die happy, knowing folks overseas like you more than they did under Bush.

Rasmussen also found that nearly twice as many feel DOJ cares too much about individual rights at the cost of security than believe the legal system cares too much about protecting national security. And a scant 28 percent would counsel Obama to pursue criminal charges against Bush admin officials.

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esterday, a group of unelected know-it-all bureaucrats decided it’s not enough that California residents alread are crushed under the second-highest tax burden in the nation, they will impose a massive new tax so they might tip at global warming windmills and force us into their choices for our cars.

The LA Times happily established the motivation for this newest attack on Californians’ wallets:

California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

Oil built this economy; oil fueled the state; oil made fortunes that created universities and endowed charities, but oil is the bogeyman of the Warmies and must be killed at all cost because they think tiny increases in a negligible atmospheric gas are going to kill us all. So CARB, the California Air Resources Board, voted 9 to 1 to pass a complex new rule that will drive up the cost of gasoline and, they hope, penalize hapless car drivers into reducing their fuel consumption by a quarter in the next decade.

And, of course, they hope this false economy will finally create huge consumer demand for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and, as the LAT hopefully put it, “jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels” from algae, woodchips and other stuff that’s been around forever and has yet to produce energy anywhere near as efficiently as good ol’ God-given crude.

Still, CARB, which calls itself “ARB” in a bold move to reduce electron waste, said:

“The new standard means we can begin to break our century-old dependence on petroleum and provide California with greater energy security” said ARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols. “The drive to force the market toward greater use of alternative fuels will be a boon to the state’s economy and public health – it reduces air pollution, creates new jobs and continues California’s leadership in the fight against global warming.”

Nichols is a long-time California greenie, and one of its most powerful. She started the Los Angeles office of the nation’s richest, most powerful environmental law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and started her many stints on CARB in 1974, when Jerry Brown appointed her its chair. She also was an Assistant Sec at EPA under Clinton. In other words, she’s been forcing environmentalism onto the public for 25 years, and doing quite well at it. The CARB release continues:

According to ARB analyses, to produce the more than 1.5 billion gallons of biofuels needed, over 25 new biofuel facilities will have to be built and will create more than 3,000 new jobs, mostly in the state’s rural areas. Production of fuels within the state will also keep consumer dollars local by reducing the need to make fuel purchases from beyond its borders.

CARB doesn’t bother to tell us how many perfectly good jobs in oil will be displaced by this Quixotic scheme, nor does it deal with the 8,000 pound gorilla in this little matter: water. Many of the rural areas they hope to bring these jobs to already have unemployment rates over 40 percent because water deliveries have been cut back so much farmers can’t grow crops. Where does Nichols expect to find the water to grow the biofuel stock, and where, oh where, does she think she’s going to find the hundreds of gallons of water needed to process each gallon of biofuel?

But they plow on. Forcing the cost of transportation up so they can force us into the cars they want us to drive, or better yet, onto the buses they don’t ride in themselves.

This state is going to Hades in hyperdrive. I’d move, but the LAT tells me 35 states are watching CARB’s action with gleeful anticipation, hoping to follow in California’s path at their earliest convenience. Watch out! California may be coming to a neighborhood near you soon.

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A

stonishingly, Gary Kayima of Salon is new to C-SM’s “Most Ridiculous Story of the Year” competition.  He’s certainly been skewered by me previously, particularly for his Palin as dominitrix piece, which I wrote about here.  Well, welcome to the club, Gary.

His Salon column today starts with a defiant headline: Torture works sometimes, but it’s always wrong. Here’s the lead:

We know and have known for years that since 9/11 we have been a nation of torturers. We have also known, in large part, what those tortures consisted of — waterboarding, slapping, sleep deprivation, the withholding of pain medication. With the Obama administration’s release of the four “torture memos,” we have learned about other disgusting practices, such as slamming prisoners into walls and locking them in boxes with insects, and gained further insight into the nauseating legal arguments used by Bush administration lawyers to justify the unjustifiable.

As you can see, the ridiculousness of this story is ingrained deeply from the outset:  Kamiya’s unthinking acceptance of a new definition of torture tortures all the careful liberal thinking that he applies to  his topic from this paragraph onward.  Let me restate it:  We know and have known for years that with 9/11 the left redefined torture to suit their purposes, not the true meaning of the word, in order to punish Bush, even if it would cost us lives.

We used to know what torture meant.  We were all clear on this simple matter: ripping out fingernails, breaking bones, applying electrical charges to sensitive parts of the body, burning with acid, raping or killing family members in front of the victim.  More historically, the rack, drawing and quartering, the Iron Maiden.  In other words, stuff that kills, that leaves marks, that changes lives.

The people who carried out these practices did so without much concern for due process, so many of their victims had no business being tortured, whether you believe in the process or are appalled by it.  It just came with the territory. “Oops, sorry. We meant to go to your neighbor’s house. Here are your fingers back. Good luck.”

Nothing is so clearly drawn with Kamiya, so he accepts not only waterboarding (aka college hazing in some schools), slapping, sleep deprivation and the withholding of pain medication as torture, and then adds to the definition of the word “disgusting practices, such as slamming prisoners into walls and locking them in boxes with insects.”  Nevermind that the walls were flexible and the prisoners wore neck braces.  Nevermind that the insects were not poisonous. Kamiya’s got anti-American outrage to fuel, and now he’s set it up by redefining torture to include behaviors like setting the alarm clock for too early.

Once he’s created this skewered and false playing field, he’s ready for his logic games – and this is where it gets really ridiculous.  He impresses us by comparing humanist Kantians who would curry to no torture (except, perhaps, those listed by Kamiya, which they probably wouldn’t consider torture) and utilitarian Benthamites, who when confronted with the ticking clock torture – get the information now, or 100 innocent children die – will pick the lesser of two evils and torture the whacko.

Kamiya isn’t buying the Behamites’ line. First, he rejects the ticking clock scenario as something “endlessly depicted in Fox’s TV show ’24,’” but presumably not in real life. Dick Cheney, in his interview with Sean Hannity, used Iyman Faris’ plot to cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge as a real-life example of such a scenario, saying waterboarding helped to reveal Iyman’s locale, which led to increased guarding of the bridge, which led to Iyman calling off the whole deal because “the weather is too hot” – too many cops.

It wasn’t exactly the ticking clock, but it was the stopping of a plot before it could be carried out.  Iyman reportedly had torches for cutting cable when he was arrested.  But don’t bother Kamiya with all that.

But in the real world, the “ticking bomb” situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds.

Under those guidelines, the perpetrator would have to be arrested, arraigned, tried and convicted before we could know with certainty that he had information that might merit torture to obtain.  Am I missing something here or is that just plain … ridiculous?

Kamiya plows on:

But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that [former Bush intelligence head Michael] Hayden and [former Attorney General Michael] Mukasey are correct, and that torturing Zubaydah led him to give information that resulted in the arrest of KSM and other terrorists. That still would not constitute a “ticking bomb” situation. No one can say whether those captured would have carried out other terrorist attacks. There are too many unknown factors.

Again, before we could pull out teeth or put bamboo under fingernails play loud music or pour water into their mouths, we would have to know their guilt with the certainty of … um … the certainty of … oh yeah! … the certainty we would have if we arrested the terrorist scum leaving the scene of the blown up school and the 100 dead innocent children, with the detonator firmly gripped in his hand.  Kamiya has succeeded in a masterful display of liberalism here:  It is better to kill innocents than to take a chance at wrongly causing temporary discomfort to an enemy of America.

He goes on to declare that a nation that puts insects in with terrorists who behead people and take down skyscrapers “forfeits any claim to a moral high ground. It becomes no better than those it is fighting.”  And he believes it.  He’s read the memos, he understands the methods.  He lived through 9/11. He knows the fate of Daniel Pearl and other unfortunates who fell into the hands of al-Qaeda. 

Yet still, he’s comfortable with his definition of torture and can see no moral difference between our carefully designed, rarely applied and thoroughly supervised non-invasive techniques and the mental wet dreams of KSM and bin Laden.

Worse, he’s willing to let you die for his beliefs.

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I’m totally with Barack Obama on this one:  Today he’s meeting with credit card bankers to try to reel in the excesses of predatory lending, excessive fees and the continual changing of the rules.

As a free marketeer, I realize that companies often need to be reigned in, but ideally this should happen in the marketplace.  Consumers should have organized against credit card abuses long ago, picketed the banks, taken to the airwaves, mailed tea bags to CapitalOne, whatever, but for whatever reasons, it hasn’t happened.  As a result, in these difficult financial times, credit card customers across America are getting notices of higher fees, lower credit lines and new and abusive interest rates.

So good for Obama for calling the meeting, even though the Fed is already starting on new rules that should improve things for consumers.  Yes, that makes the meeting grandstanding, but the issue needs some bully pulpit grandstanding. 

These warm feelings were quashed, however, by the administration’s astonishingly inept messaging.  Lawrence Summers showed just how superior they all feel about us, dripping with Ivy League self-indulgence and complete misunderstanding of anyone unfortunate enough to be beneath them.  Here’s the money quote (credit quote?):

White House economic adviser Larry Summers said over the weekend that the administration wants to curb pitches that addict people to plastic.

“Individuals are going to have to save more. That’s why savings incentives are so important,” he said. “That’s why we need to do things to stop the marketing of credit in ways that addicts people to it and so that our households are again saving and families are again preparing to send their kids to college.” (AP)

You’re probably too dumb to see it, but the whole problem is that we’re just too dumb, folks.  We’re just too retarded to understand what 28 percent APR means, or to read the print that tells us flat out that if we are late on one payment, kiss that riduculous come-on rate goodbye and welcome to the big-time interest rates.

We are not the problem, and we don’t need Lawrence Summers and a herd of bureaucrats to help with us through the steps for our addiction.  We need help with the law, which is overlooking the excesses and contractural shenanigans of the credit card industry. 

Give us a fair playing field, not an unfair insult.

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C

an anyone explain this, the lead photo on AP’s feed to Yahoo?

Miss. woman gets shot in head, but makes tea (AP)

FILE – In this Feb. 19, 2009 file photo, Lee Henderson, of Alvarado, Texas, directs an instrument panel into a waiting GM vehicle during assembly at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Arlington, Texas. Two people briefed on the plan say General Motors Corp. will close most of its U.S. factories for up to nine weeks this summer because of slumping sales and growing inventories of unsold vehicles. The people did not know exactly when the shutdowns would occur, but both say they will include the normal two-week closure in July to change from one model year to the next. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, file)

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A

s workers throughout the land – particularly in California – are just glad to have jobs and are going without raises and even accepting pay cuts, the goofballs in Sacramento decided quietly to give a bunch of California Assembly aides over $350,000 in bonuses.

Assembly speaker Karen Bass apparently never heard of the little uproar over AIG bonuses or thought she could stealth this through, but no dice.  Papers throughout the state carried the story and today, like a typical Dem politician, Bass tossed the folks she was championing under the bus.  Her quote:

“In hindsight, this was really becoming a distraction.”

You bet it was.  The Legislature and Gov. RINO are going to the people in three weeks with a package of ballot measures designed to bail them out from the state budget morass they’ve created through their intractability and obliviousness.  If they don’t pass, Sacramento will have to face reality and start cutting the feel-good bloat from the budget and do something to keep businesses from fleeing the state.

Bass’ recognition of reality probably comes too late to save the ballot measures.

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eing fortunate residents of Earth, we do have quite a lot to celebrate today … and I do wish Earth Day were a celebration instead of a dreadful day full of dire recitations of the evil man, particularly capitalist man, does to the planet and political grandstanding about saving the earth. As if the Earth could be saved by new-comer pipsqueaks like us … and as if the Earth needed saving in the first place.

But grandstand they will.  In his long-awaited Earth Day proclamation, Obama called for us to protect the nation’s natural resources like, you know, oil, because it “not only fulfills a sacred obligation to our children and grandchildren, but also provides an opportunity to stimulate economic growth.”  He apparently has missed the lesson on how much economic growth oil has stimulated.

Similarly, the eco-loons at Al’s multi-million dollar Repower America.org, made their “green equals jobs” pitch via an email:

We’ve been running ads and talking to people across the country to raise awareness about the carbon pollution loophole. And by adopting our call, President Obama has demonstrated that he understands that a cap on carbon pollution will lead to rapid growth in clean energy investment and create millions of jobs. With unemployment at 8.5%, we know there is no time to waste.

But without swift action from Congress, these jobs will be allowed to go elsewhere, as other nations continue to outpace us on progress towards a clean energy economy.

Not mentioned in this cheery little Earth Day tome is the inconvenient truth that for every new job created by new, high-priced alternative energy, there are many more jobs taken away. Start with the jobs of people who work exploring for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, delivering oil, marketing oil, and figuring out how many billions of dollars in taxes are due the government for those sales of oil. Then add the millions of jobs that will be lost as businesses fold due to rising energy prices brought on by alternative technologies that are not yet ready for prime time.  And the jobs that will be lost because lost oil tax revenues plus billion-dollar alternative energy incentives inescapably will result in crushingly higher taxes on everyone (expect Obama’s favorite class, the under-achieving).

It will be a net loss in jobs, believe me. Slapping together solar panels will not replace those jobs, nor will building windmills off the Hyannis Port coast … nor will, even, defending those windmills against lawsuits brought by the Kennedys.

So celebrate Earth Day as it should be celebrated: Thank God for giving us such a wonderful place to live, and commit to being a better steward of the resources He gave us … which means fighting deep green lunacy vigorously, and adopting light green practices like conservation religiously.

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President Obama showed of his new, friendlier approach to despots at the Summit of the Americas and came back with a lot to show for it:  A nifty new anti-American book for his collection and an on-the-record comment from Raul Castro that Cuba was willing to talk about “everything,” including press freedoms and human rights.

Maybe there really is something to this charisma diplomacy idea.  Or not:

Fidel Castro says President Barack Obama “misinterpreted” his brother Raul’s remarks regarding the United States and bristled at the suggestion that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on remittances from abroad as a goodwill gesture to the U.S. …

The former president appeared to be throwing a dose of cold water on growing expectations for improved bilateral relations — suggesting Obama had no right to dare suggest that Cuba make even small concessions. He also seemed to suggest too much was being made of Raul’s comments about discussing “everything” with U.S. authorities.

“Affirming that the president of Cuba is ready to discuss any topic with the president of the United States expresses that he’s not afraid to broach any subject,” Fidel Castro wrote of his 77-year-old brother, who succeeded him as president 14 months ago. (AP)

Dang. That kind of puts a damper on the Proz-O’s halo glow, doesn’t it? This leader of the world super-power gig is tougher than he thought; the sort of job that could use someone with experience, maybe. 

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